How Harper Lee Lost Her Voice

Her last years were mired in scandal, and more struggles over her unpublished works may lie ahead.

February 19, 2016

Stephen Shugerman / Getty Images

Once there was a time when I
thought about Harper Lee like a reader. Like millions of adolescents in America
and around the world, To Kill a Mockingbird was a required high school
text—for ninth grade, in my case. The book moved me. Its stark and simple
message of grave injustice and Atticus Finch’s valiant attempt to right
systemic racist wrongs got under my white skin, as it was meant to do. Harper
Lee’s aversion to media intrigued me, but not so much that there was a burning
need to breach it. She wanted to be left alone and made it plain, on her terms.
She was so determined, so consistent, and this attitude was easy to respect and
trust.

I stopped thinking of Harper
Lee like a reader long before February 3, 2015, when HarperCollins
surprise-announced the “discovery”
of Go Set a Watchman, the 1957 prototype for Mockingbird, and
its forthcoming publication. That day clinched the switch, though. From then on, conversations about Harper Lee vaulted out of literary and cultural circles and
into something louder, uglier, and sleazier that eroded any sense of reliability.

Her decision to publish the
book was questioned,
since she didn’t seem to speak in her own voice. We heard from Tonja Carter,
the Monroeville lawyer who began as Alice Lee’s legal assistant, then partner, to later become sole arbiter of Harper Lee’s affairs. We heard from HarperCollins (and
Penguin Random House in the UK) and from Lee’s agent, Andrew Nurnberg. We heard
from those in Monroeville who professed to know Lee best. We even heard from
Sam Pinkus, Lee’s onetime literary agent who stole away the copyright to Mockingbird,
restored to Lee only after a prior, heavily publicized lawsuit.

On the rare occasions that we
were privy to Lee’s opinions—that “happy
as hell” statement, the clip of her emphasizing her desire to publish to
documentary filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy, even that “go
away” scrawl in response to Connor Sheets, who ended up breaking the story
of her death, some kind of dogged karma in action—we questioned her
authenticity, her competence, her mental state, everything. Decades of respect
and trust evaporated. Harper Lee, that once reliable beacon of American
literature, was no longer reliable.

As the media picked Harper
Lee apart, their—my—actions sounded a sadly familiar note. She had retreated
into silence precisely because it was a way to maintain her voice when others
claimed different. Think of that awful, insulting rumor: that her childhood
friend Truman Capote contributed so much to the making of To Kill a
Mockingbird that he might as well have written it—a rumor that Capote
himself, apparently, delighted in perpetuating. Think of Lee’s research for In
Cold Blood, pivotal in many
critical ways, but virtually unacknowledged upon the book’s 1966
publication, when it was Capote that received the kudos and accolades, leaving
little for Lee.

Perhaps that’s why, when the
“big reveal” of Go Set A Watchman turned out to be that the older, more
frail Atticus Finch of the novel was a racist, to twenty-something Jean Louise’s
mortification and horror, I saw it a little differently from the outraged
masses who felt Harper Lee had absconded with their childhood. Watchman felt,
albeit in a more clumsily written, unedited way, like Lee’s attempt to speak
out for herself.

I don’t doubt her editor at
Lippincott, Tay Hohoff, made the right call in rejecting Watchman and
coaxing Mockingbird out of Lee. Mockingbird is the far superior
work. Its more binary treatment of racism in a small town, its vivid depictions
of a Depression-era childhood similar to Lee’s own, resonate with a narrative
power missing in most of Watchman (we know this because the prototype
includes verbatim passages that later showed up in Mockingbird). Scout
could get readers thinking about race and civil rights in a way that Jean
Louise in the adult version, too pent up with righteous indignation of her own,
likely couldn’t—especially at a time when Brown v. Board of Education
still felt too raw in too many Southern states.

Now Harper Lee joins the
roster of dead writers off of whom a great many people could profit.

If Watchman was,
indeed, Harper Lee’s attempt to speak in her own tongue, it failed. She was a
brand now, a line item in News Corp’s budget, too important to HarperCollins to
be a mere author. (Case in point: the deluxe editions of Watchman
selling for $1500 a pop around Christmastime.) The brand management of Lee at
HarperCollins had been, in fact, a fait accompli for years, in the same
way that The Great Gatsby, still selling half a million copies a year,
makes F. Scott Fitzgerald a brand for Scribner.

Backlist gets you so far, but
a new work—even one clearly meant for academic analysis and the archives, as Watchman
was—meant new revenue. (This is why publishers love new work by famous dead
authors.) Yet that fell short. Watchman sold over 2 million copies in
2015, and still it was not enough to counter lower revenues, negative foreign
currency fluctuations, and declining ebook sales for the year. A cash cow can
only do so much. Harper Lee could not prop up HarperCollins all by herself.
That an 89-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner with a single novel to her name was
supposed to accomplish this is, on its face, absurd.

Now Harper Lee joins the
roster of dead writers off of whom a great many people could profit. Just a
week before her death, Scott Rudin and Aaron Sorkin announced they were
producing and writing a Broadway version of Mockingbird—a prospect Lee
actively rejected for decades. G. Neri’s children’s book, Tru and Nelle, about Capote and Lee’s childhood friendship,
publishes on March 1. Rumors will persist, in part because of Tonja Carter’s
op-ed last summer strongly insinuating that other
manuscripts by Lee exist, in publishable shape to varying degrees.
Subsumed, once more, is Harper Lee’s voice. There may be one last chance for
her to speak out, when her will is probated and we learn who truly benefits
from her estate. But I fear, and hardly doubt, that document will not be Harper
Lee’s last written word. It may be years before we hear her reliable voice, if
that’s even possible.

Sarah Weinman is the editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & ’50s and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories From the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense.